The need of organizations to store documents and physical objects in archives or storage rooms for future use is common in offices.
Since a big part of work today is done by computers, there is also a growing need to store digital data and many organizations have a local or a remote digital archives where such data is archived.
Presently, many organizations cannot do without both a physical storage room and a digital archive. As both the stored objects and the stored data refer to items of work in the organization (client records, patient records, cases, real estate asset documents, products, etc.), some or all work items are represented both in a physical carrier in the storage room and in a digital folder on a computer or on a mass storage device.
The fact that the content of a single item is split, with some overlap, between a physical folder and a logical (electronic digital) folder in two separate locations is a source of inconvenience, security risk and synchronization issues.
The need for a digital data storage that is physically glued to an associated object is partially satisfied by the technology known as RFID (Radio Frequency ID) where a small amount of data (e.g. less than 10 KB) is stored on a non volatile storage device that can be read and written using energy that is transmitted to the device from the reader. This technology is very useful in tagging products, where the amount of data to be stored is less than 100 bytes.
The need for a larger digital data storage that is physically glued to an associated object is partially satisfied by a product named “Memory Spot” described by HP corporation, California, USA, in “Memory Spot: A Labeling Technology” published by the IEEE, Pervasive Computing, IEEE, April-June 2010, Issue:2, pages 11-17, ISSN: 1536-1268. This technology uses a label that is a digital memory that stores a few megabytes of data and can be accessed wirelessly for writing and reading by bringing a reading device (wand) in close proximity to the label. This is, however, not a Flash memory device and there is no way to use this label as a drive, so it cannot be used as a mass storage device of several gigabytes. Moreover, the reader cannot be attached to the label for hands-free operation by a user after attachment, preventing a user from being able to work on his computer while maintaining a connection between the label and the wand. The memory spot product can be useful as an extension of RFID. These solutions do not provide a method to integrate the digital and physical data of an item into a single object.
It would be very good if there would be a simple, inexpensive and reliable way for a user to add to any given object the ability to store associated digital data in the same physical location, so that the complete information about a work item could be handled, stored, mobilized, accessed, written and read as a single entity.
Unfortunately, there is no such way to add digital storage capability to arbitrary objects using standard storage facilities and computer peripherals.